Saturday, March 17, 2012

Loudflower - Happy Now?


1 Everyone But Me
2 Guess I Need You
3 Disaffected
4 Routine (Remix)
5 Clouds
6 Savior Business (Remix)
7 Crime Of The Century
8 Happy Now
9 Everything Rhymes With Wrong
10 Can't Change Yesterday
11 Color Of Heaven
12 5 Minutes After 3
13 Always Tomorrow
14 Comfortable Bed
15 Don't Say Goodnight

Sometimes when a band has only one album to their credit, you listen to that album and you immediately know why.  Other times, you ask yourself  "Why wasn't this a huge hit?  Why, when something that calls itself  "Lady Gaga" is selling millions of cd's, wasn't this band, that actually knew something about real music, more popular?"

Loudflower is Alt rock with horns.  Not Ska style horns. This sounds like Chicago's horn section accidentally got mixed in with a jam session by the Clash and REM.  It shouldn't work, but it does, beautifully.

A couple of the songs are labeled as remixes, but I'm not sure why, as no other versions of these songs were released anywhere. Gray Dot's 1996 "sampler" disc, "Same Three Chord's,"contained a couple of tunes, a different version of "Color Of Heaven" and an alternate version of  "5 Minutes After 3" titled "I Still Want You."  A 4 song ep titled "Christmas Killed us" was also released in '96, but that's the complete output of this band, and that is truly a shame.

What little I could find out about the band points to this being another CCM horror story.  It seems the band sued their record company for lack of a written contract, and they were held up in litigation for several years.  Because of the hurt this caused, and because of some internal "band" strife, they decided not to continue.  But they left behind a masterpiece.  Highly recommended, if you can find it.

Note:  None of the YouTube videos below feature music from the "Happy Now?" cd.  The first two are the alternate versions from the Gray Dot sampler,  but the main difference between them is much better production on the official release.  The third video is the title track from the "Christmas Killed Us" ep.




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